Dear colleagues, As promised during yesterday's meeting, some comments on the presentation Professor Zhang tabled at yesterday's meeting, now that I've been able to give it a slow read. I very much share support his idea to reduce the number of Han characters in the LGR, so that we don't spend too much time on very rare characters such as �o. My own idea for this is to use the government tables taught in school (���Ýh�� in the Japanese case; there is also �����Ýh�ֱ� for names). That would be the end of, for example, �o, at least in the Japanese table. My own personal feeling (and that indicated by Professor Kim for Korean in his recent presentation) is that, in this case, there are three characters: һ, Ҽ which has the variant �� and�o. However, the main thing is that if any language regards characters as variants, then they are variants in the script. This also applies in the cases of the other numeral characters typically used on bank notes and also in the case of many characters which used to be distinct, but are no longer. (For example, �l ��send�� and � ��hair�� in Chinese and ע ��pour�� and �] ��footnote�� in Japanese.) Regards, Chris. -- Research Associate in Linguistic Computing, Centre for Digital Humanities, UCL, Gower St, London WC1E 6BT Tel +44 20 7679 1599 (int 31599) www.ucl.ac.uk/dis/people/chrisdillon